68 A REPORTER AT LARGE THE SECRET WAR IN STARR'S OFFICE How the prosecutors wrecked the best case against the President. T HE siege of the Clinton Presidency lasted thirteen months, from January of 1998 until February of this year. In retrospect, the events of that time have about them a sense of in- evitability. Clinton's sur- vival in office, it is often said, was preordained-by his support in the polls, by the economy; by the private nature of the conduct at the heart of the case. In fact, the President came far closer to losing his office than is generally supposed. And his moment of great- est peril came not during the famous public events of the Monica Lewinsky cri- sis but, rather, during a set of closed-door negotiations that have remained to a great extent secret. The peo- ple who determined Clin- ton's fate were not, for the most part, the familiar cast of accusers and defenders in the case-neither the President's critics in Con- gress nor his own lawyers played any role-but a group of prosecutors in the office of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr whose names are relatively unknown. The crisis began in earnest late in the afternoon of Friday, January 16th, when a medical-malpractice lawyer named William Ginsburg was urgently sum- moned to downtown Los Angeles by an old friend and client named Bernard Lewinsky, an oncological radiologist. "Monica's in some kind of trouble," Lewinsky said. Ginsburg knew that Lewinsky's daugh- BY JEFFREY TOOBIN York in return for her agreement to :file a false af- fidavit in the Paula Jones case. According to this hy- pothesis, Lewinsky, at the President's instigation, had lied about a clandestine re- lationship they had con- ducted for nearly two years. The threat of prosecution notwithstanding, Lew- insk)r, who had been joined at the hotel by her mother, refused to coöpera te, and Ginsburg flew to Wash- ington to join her the fol- lowing da)!. Lewinsky picked up Ginsburg at the airport, and they went to the bar at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House, to talk. There Lewinsky told her new lawyer that she had been romantically involved with the President from about November, 1995, until March, 1997. Gins- burg, who was approach- ing the case both as Bernie's friend and as Mon- ica's attorney; was repelled by the thought of Bill Clinton seducing a woman al- most three decades his junior. Ginsburg was horrified mainly by what the rela- tionship had done to the twenty-four- year-old woman he had known as a child. She was in a state of near-hysteria, and possibly suicidal. His first priority was to get psychiatric attention for her. The next day, Ginsburg made his way to the Starr office, on Pennsyl- vania Avenue, and there a group of prosecutors reiterated the demands they had made to Lewinsky. They discussed Ilthe íoreb .1g accurately reflects the agreement ntt;l into between the Unitc:t S ad you. on behalf ofyour_c1ien Ms. Lewm.sky, please SIgn this letter and have your chent SIgn beJow I have read this entire agreement and I have discussed it with my attorneys. I freely and voluntarily enter into this agreement. I understand that if I violate any provisions oftlus agreement.. the agreement will be null and void, and I will be subject to federal prosecution as outlined in the agreement Very truly yours, KENNETII W. STARR Independent Counsel By: Bruce L. Udolf Associate Independent Counsel Mike Emmick Associate Independent Counsel \v y. . Monica Lewinsky - 0 COWlSei for Ms. Lewinsky: 3 ter had been working at the Pentagon, and he had an immediate thought. Es- pionage! Monica had been arrested for selling state secrets! Not exactly, said her father. He told Ginsburg that earlier that day F.B.I. agents and prosecutors from Starr's of- fice had confronted Monica at the Ritz- Carlton Hotel, just outside Washington, and asked her to coöperate with their investigation. Based on information they had received from her friend Linda Tripp, the investigators believed that Lewin- sky had been promised a job in New IllUSTRATIONS BY PATRICK OLIPHANT